Mitt Romney says up to 20 million will lose health insurance due to Obama health care law

Mitt Romney faced off against President Barack Obama in the first presidential debate of 2012 in Denver. We checked several claims from the debate.

During the first presidential debate in Denver, Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama’s health care law by saying, "Right now, the (Congressional Budget Office) says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year."

While PolitiFact does not put predictions to the Truth-O-Meter, we do fact-check whether politicians or pundits accurately portray the predictions made by others.

We did so in June, when Romney made a similar claim in a speech -- that "Obamacare … means that for up to 20 million Americans, they will lose the insurance they currently have, the insurance that they like and they want to keep." We rated that claim False.

We’ll take another look at the claim here.

Cherry-picking the CBO report

When we checked with the Romney campaign last June, a spokesman said the source of Romney’s claim was a March 2012 study by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress. The Romney campaign re-confirmed that source after the debate.

The CBO study was undertaken to estimate the impact of the health care law on the number of people obtaining health care coverage from their employer. CBO came up with a "baseline" estimate -- its best guess. CBO settled on a range of 3 million to 5 million fewer non-elderly people obtaining coverage through their employer each year from 2019 through 2022 than would have been the case before the law was passed. Including those with individually purchased policies means a decline of an additional 1 million to 3 million Americans.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s quite a bit lower than 20 million. So where did 20 million come from?

CBO supplemented its "baseline" estimate with four alternative, and wildly divergent, estimates. One resulted in a net gain of 3 million people with employer-sponsored insurance. The other scenarios resulted in a decline of 10 million, a decline of 12 million, and -- here it is -- a decline of 20 million.

So the 20 million number Romney cited does come from CBO, and he hedged by saying "up to." But it’s the most extreme outcome of the five presented, and it’s not the primary estimate.

Some who "lose" coverage will do so because they find better options

Even beyond the cherry-picking, Romney is wrong to say that 20 million Americans will "lose" their insurance.

According to CBO’s "baseline" estimates, 3 million people will spurn their employer’s offer of insurance and turn instead to another source, such as the health insurance "exchanges" created under the Obama health care law. In many cases, they will do this because they consider the employer’s offering to be unaffordable or lacking too many features they need.

Romney also ignores 9 million people who wouldn’t have had an employer plan before the Obama law, but who will get employer coverage after passage of the law, perhaps because of the law’s mix of subsidies and penalties for employers.

It’s also important to remember the big picture. CBO projects that, overall, the number of uninsured Americans will drop by 29 million to 31 million due to the law.

It’s not as if no one ever loses coverage today

As we have previously noted, many Americans lose their current health plan for reasons that have nothing to do with the new law, though figuring out exactly how many is surprisingly tricky.

Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that, on average, slightly more than 3 percent of employees leave their jobs in any given month. But you don’t have to change jobs to see your plan change. Your employer may change insurance carriers, or the insurance carrier may unilaterally modify the terms of your plan.

How common is this? The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that in 2007, just over 14 percent of the entire U.S. population "switched" health insurance.

All told, this churn -- which, to reiterate, is happening because of forces beyond the Obama health care law -- almost certainly dwarfs the scale of the changes Romney is talking about.

Even Romney’s cherry-picked number of 20 million amounts to 7 percent of the 270 million non-elderly people in the U.S. CBO’s preferred figure represents an even smaller share -- 1 percent to 2 percent.

Our ruling

Romney said, "Right now, the (Congressional Budget Office) says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year."

That number is cherry-picked, and many of those 20 million will be leaving employer coverage voluntarily for better options. Romney also ignores that under the status quo, many more people today "lose" coverage than even the highest, cherry-picked CBO estimate. We rate his statement False.